I've added a new expanding section to the website where you can practice saxophone orchestral excerpts and check out some recordings for comparison. Hopefully it will grow into a useful source for those preparing these extracts.
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South London Strings is a new project I am involved with, see their first ever concert (online) here, which I edited the audio and video for. It was my first time video editing and was completed with a very tight deadline, so please forgive some of the clumsiness!
To those who are interested, I direct your attention to South London Strings, a project I have been involved with since last year. The first online course finished today and it was a great success.
I've been doing more recording recently and am always eager to find a better sound. As a music technology novice, I find that much of the advice I find seems to relate more to mixing bands or mic-ing guitars, drums and vocals. I came across a useful suggestion that improved a Taimur Sullivan recording using the following simple EQ settings. I share them here in case they're of use to anyone else. With both settings the Q was about 3. Boost 1200Hz by 4dB and cut 300Hz by 4dB. Very simple and it didn't suddenly make me sound massively different but it added some 'air' to the sound and made it less boxy in a way that I found quite pleasing. I suppose this is no less important when recording than finding a good reed or playing on a professional instrument.
The Coronavirus pandemic has forced many musicians to teach online who previously had little to no experience with this way of teaching, myself included. It has been a real blessing that pretty much all of my teaching has continued when a great number of my colleagues have suffered and have simply not been permitted to teach online by their institutions. I thought it might be good to reflect on some of the positive aspects of online teaching, rather than gripe about the myriad difficulties (internet glitches, latency, audio algorithms interfering). One of the best aspects for me has been to use Sibelius to very quickly write out music examples and explain things. Sadly my notation penmanship never got particularly great and I am actually far quicker at putting something into Sibelius. It's also very helpful for quickly bringing up new pieces, sight-reading and even for things like writing notes under passages. I've also used Cubase on a few occasions to demonstrate certain aspects of music technology to pupils and even to record very brief passages for them. In general, having to work with the computer more has meant I've recorded more, since the set up is there. I also like ending the call and immediately being home with my beautiful wife and family!
Congratulations to my pupil Daniel Davis who recently won the CASSGB Young Saxophone Soloist competition. You can read about his success here.
I will be performing with my saxophone quartet Syzygy at Derby University on Friday 18th January 7.30pm. See the quartet website here for more details.
Please come to see me play live with the fantastic Decibel ensemble on Tuesday at London City University, 7pm. Tickets are free, but you need to book, see below for details:
https://www.city.ac.uk/events/2018/april/decibel My saxophone group Syzygy will be performing as part of the 2021 Perception: experimental weekend at the APT Gallery, Deptford on Saturday 5th May, some time after 5pm.
Performing in galleries has been a very enjoyable experience for Syzygy over the years. The marriage of music and visual art is an interesting one. The possible connections can seem infinite and yet pinning down exactly why any particular piece of music relates to any particular painting, say, is actually very difficult without falling into the vague waffle that so often seems to accompany both art forms in descriptions and programme notes respectively. The artefact in the visual arts exists as a fixed entity but music can only be experienced over a period of time. A chaotic painting might be brought to life by chaotic music, and the advent of MTV certainly enabled (often very synthetic) music to be enhanced by the visual. Music's collaboration with other art forms is interesting and not without controversy, so come to Deptford on Saturday 5th May and find out how Syzygy attempt to resolve the problem. One of the set pieces for the 2006 Adolphe Sax Competition in Dinant was the interestingly titled 'Ge(r)ms' by Daniel Capelletti. If memory serves, the piece was set for the first round and thus would have been learned by over hundred competitors. It is surprising to me then that a search for this piece yields very little content, only the possibility to buy the piece and a single video recording of one participant's attempt at the competition. The competition has been videoing all performances for some years now and although over ten years old I find it interesting how this piece seems to have slipped into obscurity, whilst other not dissimilar pieces seem to have established a place in the classical saxophone canon. Although perhaps more developed, the Christian Lauba studies and Oxyton, not to mention the Scelsi and Noda pieces all seem to have secured their position in the classical saxophonists' musical ghetto. Is it simply that it isn't a very good piece? I fear the same could be argued for many other more popular works. Is it the immense difficulty of the work? This shouldn't really exclude it, not in the age of Ferneyhough and Finnissy. It is ever the case that contemporary works rarely get a second airing, but I thought that there's enough of merit in this piece for it to be recorded properly by someone. Maybe I shall do it myself at some point and see if there's any possibility of rekindling enjoyment for this work.
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June 2022
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